Many products require product testing. Supplier of products generally require products be tested before they can be made available to customers. Testing of products can be a lengthy and complicated process. There may be many different technical features in the product that need to be tested under different testing parameters. Many product suppliers may not have in-house product testers. These product suppliers will need to outsource product testing to outside product testers. However, finding the right product testers who can adequately perform the product testing project can itself be a time-consuming process, and can be challenging. If the product supplier needs fast turn-around time for the product testing for its product, such out-sourcing technique may not be suitable.
Furthermore, a product provided by a product supplier may include an online payment feature that allows a user to submit payment using credit card. When performing product testing on such online payment feature, legacy approaches use dummy credit card number generators and/or gift cards as substitutes for actual real credit cards during product testing. Use of the dummy credit cards has been favored over real credit cards for the obvious reasons that product suppliers generally do not prefer to make a real word payment transaction (e.g., to buy an item or to pay for a service) while testing the online payment feature of its product. However, dummy credit card generators may not work in production systems. Also, dummy credit card is not processed as real word transaction, and so it may not allow detection of problems that may otherwise occur if actual credit card is used in the online payment feature of the product. Gift cards are often blocked by companies.
In addition, gift cards, including reloadable cards, can be costly and don't work like real credit cards do. This is because payment processor of many companies may detect gift cards, and may opt to block such gift cards from being used. In addition, gift cards are processed differently from credit cards. Thus, use of gift cards may prevent the online payment feature to be fully tested.
In some cases, corporate cards may be proposed for product testing. However, the amount of overhead and manual work necessary to setup corporate cards to be used for product testing may be overwhelming.